Black hat down: What happened to the world’s most famous hackers?

Hackers can be any shape, size, color, and creed, but they are all graced with a level of mental acuity that mere mortals simply do not possess. Physically, they are rarely exceptional. Philosophically and morally, they can vary from ultra-conservative to bleeding-heart liberal. Even by nature and nurture, there is no obvious way to discern whether someone will become a hacker or not.

But there is something that sets hackers apart from normal people. Hackers see things differently, and they tend to have a very different view of how the world and its constituent parts are put together. Instead of merely accepting something as true or workable or ideal, a hacker needs to know the why; a hacker needs to tear the construct apart until he can look upon the constituent parts and decide for himself how and why it works — or, as the case may be, why it doesn’t work.

Hackers exist in almost every technological arena, too. Computer hackers (sometimes referred to as crackers) — the kind who break into the Pentagon — are by far the most common in popular culture, but there are software hackers (programmers), gadget and consumer electronics hackers (hobbyists), and more. Generally, if you put someone with a hacker mindset in the vicinity of an object that can be hacked — which is almost everything — then it will be hacked, either for the forces of good… or evil.

The funny thing about hacking, though, no matter its flavor, is that it’s an incredibly valuable skill to have. There is a reason that almost every lone wolf hacker eventually ends up in the employ of a large, multi-national company — and believe it or not, many hackers that break into NASA or the CIA are usually offered a full-time job to prevent other hackers from doing the same. There are other hackers, however, that have committed crimes so heinous that they will never again be allowed to touch a computer, or even own a digital device like an iPod.

Today we’re going to look at some of the most famous computer hacks of all time, their perpetrators, and where they are now. First up, the hacking superstar who started it all: Kevin Mitnick.

If we were going to look at the entire history of computer/network hacking, this post would be very different indeed :)

Anonymous

Captain Crunch?

R Doucette

He was given that name as the instrument which John Draper used for phreaking was a toy that came in a box of Captain Crunch and could create a tone at exactly 2600 hertz which was the same frequency AT&T which would, in the end, allow him to become his own operator.

He would later build the blue boxes.

Neat, eh?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Surely one of the best nicknames ever :)

R Doucette

He was given that name as the instrument which John Draper used for phreaking was a toy that came in a box of Captain Crunch and could create a tone at exactly 2600 hertz which was the same frequency AT&T which would, in the end, allow him to become his own operator.

Having met captain crunch he should have got a mention I know things he did that would shock most of you, anyway if you wish to learn more try reading – http://www.heaven-or-hell-its-your-choice.com/
It is endorsed by CC himself and others and it is free.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Thanks for the link :)

David Cook

Corewar/Redcode was made public in 1984 – with people coding with this in mind, surely there were other viruses predating Morris.

It seems very unlikely that Morris was the first to create the first “self-replicating, self-propagating computer virus” – just the first to get in trouble for it getting into the wild.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

I’m sure there were other viruses, but for a worm to exist, the internet has to exist — and pre-Morris, there wasn’t really much of an internet!

But yes, it’s possible that other worms pre-date Morris. The best hackers/worms/criminals/etc are the ones that you never hear about, eh?

David Cook

On the wikipedia page for computer virus it says: “The first PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed “(c)brain” created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written.”

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